Following through on their election promise to “make work pay”, Iain Duncan Smith, the UK’s Minister for Work and Pensions has unveiled proposals for a radical reform of unemployment benefit policy. The reforms are aimed at resolving a perennial problem of the benefit system – that sometimes employment does not pay. According to the coalition government, the new programme will remove the “artificial barriers to employment” and reduce the number of jobless households in the UK by 300,000. Central to the reform is a ‘claimant contract’ where benefit claimants who reject job offers will be penalised by the withdrawal of their benefits. Additionally the range of benefits under the existing system will be replaced by a “Universal Credit” combining the numerous forms of financial support currently available to the out of work.
What is interesting about Duncan Smith’s proposals, and what could soon be replicated in the up-coming budget in Ireland, is the combination of structural change and cyclical expectations. It is a mish-mash of new Con-Dems and old Tories. Continue reading “Making work pay: Vulnerable groups and UK welfare reform”
They clean your hotel room, serve you in restaurants, pick your vegetables, clean your office, build your houses, mind your children and they may even entertain you. While many of these people are regular workers, there is a real possibility that these workers are, in fact, irregular migrant workers (sometimes referred to as “illegal” or “undocumented” workers). Due to their status as “illegal”, they strive to conceal their identities and their lives in case they are subject to deportation. But how do migrant workers become irregular and what is their status in Irish employment law?